Daily Journal Pages for Jack

I have recently been enchanted with books illustrated by Sonia Sanchez.  She has a wild and irresistible style.  My favorites, so far, include The Little Red Fort, about a younger sister in a family of four, who designs and builds her own fort because her three brothers are too busy and uninterested.  In the end, they are full of admiration. 

I also love Evelyn Del Ray is Moving Away, written by Meg Medina and illustrated by Sanchez.  I have been reading it often with my almost two and a half year-old grandson, Jack, who has been my companion for two days every week since the pandemic broke out last March. 

Jack will announce to his parents as we read, “Evelyn is moving to a new home!” And she is moving away from her best friend and neighbor.  I now tear up every time I read it.  I would anyway, I imagine.  But now, Jack and his parents are moving away, at the end of May.  Their year here has been an unexpected gift to Ashley and to me.  Living in Vermont was never a part of their plan.  But it happened.  And now, we are closer than ever in every way.  

In the fall, Jack will attend a Reggio inspired school in New Jersey. At the end of a recent visit, the director told Jack’s mother that my books were on his shelf.  That makes me happy.  After over a year of quarantine and being in a small pod with his parents and grandparents, Jack is ready for friends his own size!  I will love visiting him at school and watching him grow and thrive. Though, just like Evelyn and her best friend, it will be very hard to say goodbye.  “We have had such fun!” as Ashley’s mother used to say. 

I have lots of photo images and notes about observations and adventures that we have had together…from the whole year.  About a month ago, I decided to start composing “daily journal” pages about our days together.  I heard that at Jack’s new school, there will be a daily newsletter.  In most Reggio inspired schools, these are called daily journals.  Daily journals are full of observations by teachers, quotes of children, photos of children at work, drawings and other student work.  These pages show what the children are learning that from the teachers’ point of view….is unexpected, wonderfully intelligent, and creative.  They feature “the teacher as researcher”…learning from and alongside the children. 

In my case, in our case, it is a little different. We are one on one. I am one grandmother, and Jack is one grandchild. Jack is not part of a class of children and I am not his teacher. And, I have been in this business for a long time, I truly love it, and I am always learning. It has been and will continue to be a thrill to be an educator grandmother who has a passion for the “100 languages of children.” As Jack exclaims often, and now so do we all, with arms raised high above our heads,…“Gratitude!”

 Jack visiting his pig friends at Blue Ledge Farm.

A Year Later

Last Saturday night, from a window view, we watched as fireworks sent their colors and sparks over the Middlebury College campus.  The students returned several weeks ago after three months away, and now, they are mostly out of the COVID woods having quarantined and been tested repeatedly. They are back in classes in person.  Still masked and distanced, but they are back. The fireworks marked the 365 days that have passed since they were all sent home and the campus closed March on 13th, 2020. 

And so it goes for all of us.  Most of us are reflecting on a whole year of loss, grief, restriction, racial injustice, climate crisis, and political unrest and division.  I realize, that in spite of so much loss, I feel so much more grateful for just about everything than I did a year ago.  I realize how fortunate I am.  We have enough to eat, we have a warm house, we have space, we have ways to live that nurture us and that help others.  This is not true for many people. 

From Principia Early Learning Center, St. Louis, MO

We have been so impressed with the adaptability, resourcefulness, and resilience of teachers.  Those with whom we work at Principia School in St. Louis, those who teach our grandchildren at Lincoln School in Brookline, MA, those who are in our family, those who are our friends and neighbors, those who continue to show up for professional development that will help them do a better job…really all teachers everywhere.  They are indeed essential, tireless workers who make all the difference in our children’s lives. 

We believe that no matter our circumstance, it is probably worth our while to reflect on what we may have learned and appreciated from all this time at home. 

I have seen several articles with questions that prompt such reflection.  Like these questions included in a recent newsletter. 
Pandemic Pondering

1.      What is something you did before the pandemic that you are looking forward to doing again?

2.      What is something you started to do during the pandemic that you hope to continue?

3.      What is something you did before the pandemic that you want to let go of?

4.      What is something you started to do during the pandemic that you will be happy to stop?

Winter landscape watercolor, by Louise

Early in the pandemic, last April maybe, I joined a visual arts online community hosted by Kate Gridley, an acclaimed artist who lives around the corner.  Open to anyone, this community has responded to Kate’s drawing prompts that have ranged from daily to weekly and met to share on Zoom on Thursday evenings. 

Last week the prompt was:  

Make an image, or several — a drawing, painting, photograph, collage — or a written commentary — just something personally meaningful — about something that is a vital part of your life TODAY that wasn’t a vital part of your life one year ago.

This is what I wrote: 

Taking it slow…staying put, appreciating staying put. 

The turn of the seasons, the days, the hours.  Seeing 365 days come and go without leaving (well hardly). 

Watching the birds, the light, the snow, the summer, the dramatic changes and the slow changes. 

Walking the land, the same land.  Our neighborhood, the Hurd Grasslands, Otter View Park, the Trail Around Middlebury.  

Snowshoeing, back country skiing.  Trying new things.  Making our own recreation.  Paddling on Otter Creek, on reservoirs, on lakes.  Loving the lapping water and the dappled reflections. 

Taking up the ukulele, taking lessons.  Baking sour dough bread.

Feeling very close to friends and family who I am in touch with regularly on a phone call, or a zoom call, or a walk, a snowshoe, or a ski.  

Becoming a better roommate to my husband, Ashley. 

The rhythm of the days, a relaxed pace, a chosen pace. 

The satisfaction of putting my whole self into things…writing, walking, thinking with colleagues and clients, being a friend, listening, reading, practicing yoga, knitting, drawing, painting, cooking.  

Most of the time, I feel grounded, free, centered, and grateful. 

At the beginning of all this, a year ago, if you had asked me to project out a year, I doubt I would have imagined such a reflection. 

My neighbor and college classmate has been making small quilted pieces to hang on the wall out of colorful scraps she had left from making over a hundred masks last spring.  She gifted one to her high school age grandson for his birthday and wrote, “This is a reminder that you can always help a little, and that beautiful things can come out of a hard time.” 

Sap Moon Sugarworks, Weybridge, Vermont

This year, we joined up with another neighbor and fellow classmate to offer sap from our tapped maple trees.  A group of neighbors all contribute sap, labor, and communal dinners for the long days of sap boiling and syrup making. They divide up the syrup at the end.  Bird told me, “No money ever comes onto the table…ever.” We donate everything and we give it all away.” 

We visited last year as COVID came roaring into our lives. This year, we have come full circle and are tapping our own sugar maple trees and joining the efforts of Sap Moon Sugarworks.  We feel so fortunate to be included. What a perfect way to celebrate the beginning of the end of this challenging, lonely year, bookended by sweetness, sugar, and friends and neighbors working the land together. 

We wish you all the very best as winter turns to spring, the buds swell, and the sap rises.  

Syrup, Sap Moon Sugar Works, Weybridge, Vermont

The St. Michael School of Clayton...Where We Brought Reggio Emilia Home

A year ago (seems like an age ago) I (Ashley) flew from our Middlebury, Vermont home out to St. Louis, Missouri to give an address to the annual fund raising gala at my old school, The St. Michael School of Clayton (SMS). I was Head of School there for 16 years, and with mountains of collaboration we brought Reggio Emilia home there (and a lot of other progressive ideas). I thought it would be fun to reprise my presentation to the audience of St. Michael School parents as a blog post…particularly as it might inspire renewed spirit for innovation in education as we approach the New Normal. Here it is. Please remember, I am talking directly to parents; and the images I’ve chosen come from SMS, The College School (also in St. Louis, where Louise taught) and my family.

I trust that I’m preaching to the choir here…however, I’d still like to sing you a familiar tune; that it might remind you of why you are here.

The experience your children are having at The St. Michael School of Clayton is unique, powerful and lasting…Foundational.

I wish it wasn’t so unique — but in my 20 some years of consulting in schools around the country and Europe, that is my experience.  I wish all schools were like The St. Michael School.

At The St. Michael School you have shifted the paradigms of

the image of the child

the role of the teachers

and the place for parents…and the community.

You understand that each child is born FULL: they are NOT empty vessels into which you pour knowledge. They are each unique souls filled with potential; filled with the capacity to discover, to construct learning.

Our strongest, most fundamental human instinct is to wonder and to learn. You embrace that.

Andrew Archie, the rector of The Church of St. Michael & St. George, had an ahah moment with both of his young sons in the school.  One day he came up to me in the hallway and declared: 

You know, your image of the child is congruent with my Episcopal faith.  

You say the child is strong, rich, and capable.  

We say, each child is born filled with God’s grace.

I repiled: PRAISE BE.

When you understand this about children, then through a lot of research and experience, you also come to understand that children learn differently — they manifest different learning styles; they have, as Howard Gardner has researched and validated, multiple intelligences; or, as our colleagues in Reggio Emilia say, they make sense of the world…of phenomena…through 100 languages…not just reading, writing and ‘rithmetic, but through using different materials in visual arts, through music and dance, through their emotional senses, through experimentation, and on and on….

Here’s a snapshot of what I mean from a few years ago. Jenny Morrison, with a group of 4th graders, posed the question: What are we made of? Among their many ideas was: cells. Jenny got out the microscopes and books. Students drew illustrations of what they found. On the playground Jenny found them lying on the ground creating a circle with their bodies, with several of them curled up in the circle. See Mrs. Morrison, we’ve made a cell with our bodies. Later, in the art studio, three of the boys were experimenting making shapes out of copper wire. Hey, Mr. Holohan, we can make 3D globes out of this wire, like CELLS. So, they all made models of cells out of wire with different found objects suspended inside representing different parts of the cell.

If this looks like FUN, it’s because it IS.

And, it’s WORK…GOOD WORK…instilled with an ethic of excellence.

Fundamentally, you also understand that learning happens in relationship — not as single isolated cells — but as interconnected beings.  Learning occurs in relation to compatriots and peers, to teachers, to families, to the extended community.  Learning happens collaboratively.

One April midmorning I was roaming the halls, checking in on different classrooms, when a group of third graders came pouring out of their classroom…on their way to get some fresh air, I think.  They were all obviously upset.  I stopped one boy.  

Jimmy, what’s going on.  Why are you all so upset.

Oh, Mr. Cadwell, you wouldn’t believe what they made us do!

No?  What?

They made us take a TEST!

Really!  And that made you upset?

Yeah, cuz they made us each do it by ourselves!

Oh?

Don’t they realize that if they let us do it together we’d get it ALL RIGHT!

Children learn to listen to each other, and to build ideas together.

(By the way…isn’t that the way the Real World works?)

In shifting the paradigm of the image of a child, you also shift the paradigm of the role of the teacher.  The teacher is no longer simply the sage on the stage.  Rather, the teacher is the mirror, the scaffold, the provoker, the challenger.  The teacher listens, observes, records, questions, WAITS AND WONDERS.  The teacher is a researcher.

This requires special converts.  Professionals who see that beyond being an instructor in skills, they need to:

• arrange their environments with well organized, sophisticated materials

• create spaces that connect visually

• manage the logistics of small and large group investigations and dialogue

• plot and carry out thoughtful learning experiences, intradisciplinary experiences, taking the disciplines OUT of their traditional silos, and injecting them into a network of all the languages

• Invite children into BIG QUESTIONS — questions that intersect with the most essential question of our time: What is INTERDEPENDENCE?

• Guide students into work that contributes to the community

• Encourage, cajole, and lead the students into an ethic of excellence

• Make this learning visible…through reflective documentation

All so that students develop high levels of skillful communication, symbolic skills, and creativity.

So that students see systems, collaborate across boundaries, and create (versus just problem solve).

All what we like to call THINKING.

Which brings us from children and teachers to parents and the community. Parents are partners in this learning journey. Heaven knows…parenting is among the most challenging, mystifying, and rewarding thing we ever do as humans. Much has been written disparaging helicopter parents… morphed into snow plow parents…now, lawnmower parents. 

At SMS you are welcome to be a partner. You are invited to be included in the BIG QUESTIONS that your child is asking. You’re asked to discover how you could be a resource for more learning experiences that relate to the question. You read the reflections of the teachers written on the web and on the walls. You look for ways in your busy life to be present — like you are tonight — to stand with your child in this community — to stand and dance with every child in this community.

You have all come to know your children in a new way. You know your children are full, filled with the desire to learn, to discover how the world works…and how it doesn’t.

You recognize that this perspective of children requires an environment that 

• Values relationships between children, teachers, parents and the extended community.

• Challenges children with rich, thought provoking experiences,

• And that responds to their ideas, theories and creativity in a way that compels them to go further, to ask the next question, to work harder, to make excellent work.

This is a vibrant learning community: a place, a network of people, a practice of education.

That compels us to give generously…and most importantly, to have fun and enjoy the ride.

I show you this sketch that I drew of SMS for a permit to build a playground in the front of the school.  I could have taken a photo and photoshopped in the fence and the entry arch. But somehow, that would not have evoked the feeling behind the project.  There is a convincing aesthetic to the drawing.  It worked.  We got the permit.

Now as I look at this sketch, I realize it represents for me my life’s work.  This school has given my life meaning…as it has to so many others.

The poet Mary Oliver, in A Summer Day, writes of a transcendent experience she had in a field in summer, at one point she describes in exquisite detail her observations of a grasshopper.  She calls the experience blessed.  In the end she turns to you, the reader and asks:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

I’d say that you are answering that challenging, beautiful question…Here…Tonight…And every day at The St. Michael School.

You are making meaning of this life…together…with your most important partners in this journey…your children.

Bless you.

SO, ONWARD!

AND RAISE YOUR PADDLES, 

WITH HEARTS FULL OF THANKSGIVING.

The Hill We Climb

It is 10 degrees outside, bright and sunny, and the landscape is blanketed in white.  Our son, Chris likes to say that there is always a bird party in our backyard because of the feeders and suet baskets that Ashley fills regularly.  Right now, I am watching chickadees, juncos, cardinals, nuthatches, and house finches swoop in toward the closest feeder, enjoying lunch on a very cold day.  Last night, I bundled up and went outside to stand under the bright wolf moon, and to gaze at the stars above our house and the shadows cast by trees on the fields.  I felt grateful to be alive and well in January, 2021.  

While this day to day life happens and the seasons turn, the pandemic rages and the divisions in our country and threats to our democracy continue.  Even as we settle into new leadership that is working to bring steadiness, calm, real help, and dignity to all of us.  Ashley and I listen regularly to David Brooks, a moderate Republican, on the PBS News Hour and read his editorials in the New York Times.  On January 21, he wrote this:

Just by who he is, Biden sets the stage for a moral revival. His values cut across the left/right, urban/rural culture war we’ve been enduring for a generation.  This will begin to heal a broken and ungovernable nation. Next, Biden will work to depoliticize American life. Over the last years, politics was about everything except actual governance. Under Trump, partisanship was about personal identity, class resentment, religious affiliation, racial prejudice and cultural animosity.

I was shocked by how moved I was by the Biden inaugural. We’ve been through an emotional hailstorm over four years. Suddenly the sky has cleared. It’s possible America may emerge from this trauma more transformed than we can imagine.

This is what I keep my eye and heart focused on these days…a long view that the time has come to honor the pluralism and beauty that is our country and our planet and to work to protect and sustain all of us.  

A powerful piece of the Inauguration was seeing and listening to Amanda Gorman read her poem, “The Hill We Climb.”  A glowing, powerful, graceful young Black woman, the first National Youth Poet Laureate, recited a moving and beautiful poem about our history, our struggles, our democracy, and the future that is before us to create.  

She ends her inaugural poem with these lines:

We will rebuild, reconcile and recover
and every known nook of our nation and
every corner called our country,
our people diverse and beautiful will emerge,
battered and beautiful
When day comes we step out of the shade,
aflame and unafraid
The new dawn blooms as we free it
For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it
If only we’re brave enough to be it

Amanda Gorman reading at the Biden Harris Inauguration, January 20, 2021 Credit @bideninaugural Instagram

To hear a such a brilliant poem that in many ways is both instructional and visionary was uplifting and brought many of us to tears.  We have been missing this infusion of beauty and culture from our leaders for a long time. 

Vea Vecchi, long time atelierista and researcher in the schools of Reggio Emilia, Italy, often speaks  about the fundamental place of aesthetics and poetics in learning, in understanding, in growing to love the world.  In Reggio Emilia, educators believe that learning without this element is incomplete and impoverished.  

In her TEDx talk in 2011, Vea says:

Within its very structure, 

Poetic thinking does not separate but puts together

Imagination and the cognitive

Emotions and rationality

Empathy and deep investigation and research

It awakens all of our senses and perceptions

Feeding a strong and deep relationship with what we have around us

And, this creates two ways of being in the world…solidarity and participation, both are the basis of democracy.  This is far away from indifference and violence, which are among of the worst ills that we have. 

Vea Vecchi and Charles Schwall at the St. Micheal School, St. Louis, MO, June, 2004

In her essay “Poetry is Not A Luxury,” that I found reference to in Letters from Layla, Audre Lorde writes…[Our powers] lie in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. They are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare. 

To bring these dreams and visions to life, we have work to do.  White people have so much to learn and so much unconscious bias to bring into the light.  Our history is full of trauma, discrimination, violence, and hate.  Making a commitment to read, to study, to learn, to stay in the conversation and to participate in dismantling systemic racism is a pledge that we have taken. 

I have found it thrilling to learn more about Amanda Gorman, as both a poet and an activist, reading more about her, now following her, listening to some of her past performances, discovering that she has a children’s book, Change Sings, coming out in September!  One resource that I found that is beautifully done, and a must see for educators of young children is this special, PBS Kids Talk about Race and Racism, aired last October, 2020, hosted by Amanda Gorman. Don’t miss it. 

In an interview in USA Today about the special, she says:

We often don’t give kids enough credit for their intelligence, particularly their emotional and moral intelligence.  We can’t end [racism] unless we have a dialogue about it, and that can't be a one-time conversation…It has to be continuous and interwoven in our lives and the ways in which we communicate with our children. And that conversation doesn’t always have to be daunting. It can have its own fun, its own light, its own joy and love that’s brought forth by families.

To put this so simply: Racism is real, but race is not, in the way we’ve constructed it, meaning that I hope that when families watch this they don’t leave with a sensation that Black people are drastically different from white people.

I want them to understand that, yes, skin differences, hair differences, language differences, those do exist. But when we boil it down, we are all part of only one race, which is the human race. We have to remember that when we talk about racism, because that underscores how incorrect it is, that it’s trying to draw lines between us when we’re really part of the same family.

I found Amanda Gorman’s presence on this special, as her presence is everywhere, uplifting and full of light and joy.  We can thank our lucky stars that visionary and poet Amanda Gorman has stepped on to our national stage at just the right moment for our children and for all of us.

The Shortest Day

I find myself welling up with tears around this time of year whenever I let Christmas in.  Always, when I play carols that I used to hear when my mother placed her carefully stored vinyl records from Kings College onto the small record player in her study.  As far back as I can remember, each year we would go to my uncle’s house every Sunday in Advent and sing carols with my cousin Ellie playing the piano and leading us all.  There was a tree with real candles, an antique, sparkling music box, large, round, and sturdy at the bottom of the tree beside a small creche.  Another world and time that I can conjure up just by hearing the sweet voices singing these carols now, on this gray, cold morning in our Vermont house, with only me sitting here remembering and writing.  

I was lucky to be my mother’s companion growing up.  My sisters and my brother were much older, in their teens and in college by the time I was six.  One of my mother’s friends used to tell me, “I always wondered what such a small child could appreciate in the museum when I watched you and your mother climb the big, wide steps, hand in hand, to visit the St. Louis Art Museum. 

But I was enchanted from the very beginning.  Over the years I visited many museums with my mother who loved and knew art history, often standing before Renaissance paintings of the Nativity by Fra Angelico, Botticelli, or Ghirlandaio.  She would say something like this, “Look at how the mother gazes at her baby, the tenderness. It is a beautiful story of a star guiding the way, a humble birth, animals and creatures gathered around.  It holds the beauty and mystery of every birth, the hope at the birth of every child.  The light in the darkness at this time of year.  It is a timeless story.”

As far as religion goes, my mother became as much a Buddhist as a Christian, and fortunately for me, I learned to love mindfulness and meditation and the example of the awakened Buddha from her as well as the Christmas Story and the example of goodness and light, justice and courage lived by the Christ Child.

Student made creche, circa 1980

When I taught art at Stowe Elementary School in Vermont, early on in my career, the sixth grade and I made a terra cotta creche.  Each child made a figure or an animal, a shepherd, a wiseman, a sheep, or a cow.  Rather than take it all apart, I decided with their agreement, to bring it home all in one piece.  It is a treasured part of Christmas for me to unwrap each figure and assemble it. I look forward to lighting candles all around the scene each evening and to sharing the child made creche with family and friends.

A recent sweet memory is of the pop up Christmas Pageant at our Middlebury Unitarian Church in 2016 when our grand daughter, Delilah, at age two, chose to be a sheep, all by herself. She just put her hand up when asked if there were children who wanted to participate, and there she was!

Another tradition our family included in the Christmas season when we had our own young children was to attend the Christmas Revels in Hanover, NH.  We dressed up, piled into the car and drove the hour and a half to Hanover.  The Revels brings such joy alive for all ages…full of fanciful costumes, local talent of actors and an orchestra of horns, drums, and strings, children singing, a play within a play, usually involving a dragon, and several beloved songs sung every year.  When our first grandchild was only two, we all attended the Christmas Revels in Cambridge, Massachusetts and now that has also become a renewed tradition for three generations.  This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Revels founded by John Langstaff. Because of the pandemic, Revels directors have produced a marvelous digital version which spans all those 50 years. It is available for streaming until December 31st, 2020.

This holiday season is such a difficult one for most of us all around the world.  Enormous numbers of people are still sick and dying from the pandemic.  So many have lost their livelihood and are living with uncertainty and hardship.  Most of us are not traveling or spending this beloved time with our families. And yet, just as I reflected at Thanksgiving, I find myself feeling deeply grateful for this life, for my family and friends, and for the traditions and the stories of light and hope that have sustained me all of these years.  I am grateful for the chance to live this human life and for all the gifts that I have been given. 

Always, at the end of the second act of the Christmas Revels everyone stands and joins a line dance with all the cast, singing and dancing out to intermission singing all the verses of Lord of the Dance and this chorus: 

Dance, then, wherever you may be,

I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,

And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be,

And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said he.

I like to think that we are headed into a time of renewal and hard work, of justice and well-being, of a change of heart for all of us.  I like to think that we might all join this Dance toward safety, health, happiness, and ease of heart for everyone and for our beautiful planet.  I am reminded that it is important to take a long view, and at the same time to choose every opportunity to put commitment to a just and cared for world into action.  

I conclude with a poem by Susan Cooper, recited every year at every Christmas Revels performance.  Today, December 21st, is The Shortest Day!  It is also the day of the Great Conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, a rare alignment of the two planets in their respective orbits from Earth’s view. This conjunction has also been called the Christmas Star. Be sure to go out and look for it above the horizon in the southwestern sky about an hour after sunset.

We wish you all many blessings for a heartwarming holiday season wherever you are, and for a joyful new year full of renewal for every one of us.

The Shortest Day

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died

And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world

Came people singing, dancing,

To drive the dark away.

They lighted candles in the winter trees;

They hung their homes with evergreen;

They burned beseeching fires all night long

To keep the year alive.

And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake

They shouted, reveling.

Through all the frosty ages you can hear them

Echoing behind us—listen!

All the long echoes, sing the same delight,

This Shortest Day,

As promise wakens in the sleeping land:

They carol, feast, give thanks,

And dearly love their friends,

And hope for peace.

And now so do we, here, now,

This year and every year.

Welcome, Yule!